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The Splintered Self: Character and Vision in Sam Shepard’s Plays

 
Ramesh Prasad Panigrahi (Author)
Synopsis This is the first critical evaluation in India, published on Sam Shepard, the Pulitzer winner of the Off and Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement, and this book premiers the study of a whole different way of comprehending Shepard’s exciting, avant-garde and bafflingly experimental plays. A treatise on postmodern characterology, the book maps out the psychic terrains of the performers that are fractured bits of acting selves collaged as characters to image the structure of his plays. The playwright treats these splintered characters more as aesthetic components that a mimetic human beings. But, Dr. Panigrahi measures them in terms of psychological splintering and proves that if the dramatic characters do have a character, why not the performers? Besides chartering the evolutionary history of the multiple interpretations of self and character, the study traces the formats of post-Albee dramaturgy from multi-disciplinary perspectives: film, sculpture painting music and pop culture. The study also extensively deploys theories of psychology from Freud to Lacan at different stages, the game mechanics of Berne and other references pertaining to the episteme of self. The arguments are strengthened occasionally by references to pop music, jazz, cowboys, science fiction, hipster-argot, rock rhythm, tribal myths, gangsters, slang and rhapsodic poetic lines since Shepard uses them for theatrical spell of magic. The book occasions, in many ways, the first space in India, for an alternative criticism on postmodern theatre. There emerges from the book a deep probing into the polymathic imagination of Shepard and ultimately, a probable pattern to experience the artfulness of the characters, their power to attract our attention and their compulsive necessity to surrender to pretensions and fictionality, which constitute the artistic truth of these splintered characters.
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About the author

Ramesh Prasad Panigrahi

Ramesh Prasad Panigrahi (b. 1944) is a formerly faculty in the postgraduate department of English, Ravenshaw College, Cuttack. A specialist on Indian drama and postmodern American theatre, Mr. Panigrahi is better known in media circle as playwright, director, screenplay writer and theatre anthropologist. He has directed Sam Shepard’s Icarus’ Mother and Buried Child for the campus theatre and has acted in several plays – both in Oriya and English languages. Panigrahi has worked as writer-director for the Jatra folk plays, some of which John Russell Brown has witnessed and praised in an article “Jatra theatre and Elizabethan Dramaturgy” published in New theatre Quarterly (1993). Dr. Panigrahi is seen occasionally moving across the countryside with folk and tribal artists on truck boards beyond his teaching hours. He is an exact contemporary of Sam Shepard and both of the them have started their careers in 1963. During these four dacades of his show-biz career, he has written about more than fifty plays with Sahitya Akademi Award (1984) and a Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (2001) to his credit. He has co-edited books in English on painting and culture studies, and Sangeet Natak Akademi has published his book captioned Perspectives on Odissi theatre. Besides literature, he teaches screenplay writing, E-journalism, Event Management, Culture Studies and Creative Writing as a guest faculty in different institutions. Currently, he officiates as a delegated Board Member for the Central Board of film Certification, Mumbai.

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Bibliographic information

Title The Splintered Self: Character and Vision in Sam Shepard’s Plays
Format Hardcover
Date published: 01.01.2004
Edition 1st ed.
Language: English
isbn 8188683477
length x+181p., Bibliography; Index; 23cm.